Léa Paymal

Centre de Recherche en Design, CRD (ENS Paris-Saclay) | LISN (équipe ExSitu), Department of Computer Science (CNRS, INRIA, Université Paris Saclay)

2025/2

I am currently a doctoral student in the Design department of the École Normale Supérieure Paris-Saclay (Centre de Recherche en Design, CRD) and in the Computer Science department of the Université Paris-Saclay (LISN, équipe ExSitu).

I hold a BA in industrial fashion design from the Geneva University of Arts and Design (HEAD-Genève) and a Master’s degree in design research from the École Normale Supérieure Paris-Saclay.

Grounded on critical design and ethnographic design methods, my practice-based research interrogates the forms of engagement with domestic products and challenges the dominant design norms.

Reconstraining buttons: engaging with domestic products in the age of automation

Léa Paymal, Sensory Calibration Control Kit, version 1., "Critical Territories" exhibition, Design Department, ENS Paris-Saclay, 2025.

As the world becomes more complex, the button has not changed. Domestic environments are becoming increasingly responsive to us through the introduction of automated systems in domestic products. Turned smart through this operation, these products are largely operated through buttons, which serve as the primary means of control and mediate much of our everyday interaction with technology. Despite being a core design element in domestic products, buttons are typically treated as mere interfaces. Yet, the complexity and systemic implications behind buttons are significantly underestimated. They are extremely standardized, shaped by a dominant value system and constrained within an industrial paradigm around automation grounded on delegation. I argue that this narrow design focus contributes to a dislocated form of interaction between the starting of a system and its effects, through a potentially massive sequence of events. The core of this research is an in-depth examination of the complexity behind buttons: What is a button? What are the categories of buttons? How do they work and behave? What are their effects and consequences?